NEGRO LITERATURE
207
gress at Texas State Penitentiary in 1934 (I
omit
the repeated first
lines of each stanza) :
Lord, you light weight skinners, you better learn to skin,
Old Mister Bud Russell, I tell you, he wants to starve the men.
o
my mama, she called me, I'm gonna answer UMam?"
Lord, ain't you tired of rollin' for that big-hat man?
She's got nine gold teeth, long black curly hair,
Lord, if you get on the Sante Fe, find your baby 'there.
I been prayin' Our Father, Lord, Thy king-dam come,
Lord, I been prayin' Our Father, let Your will be done.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
I'm gonna count these blues she's got on her mind.
Here motifs of work, compulsion and hunger, mother and rebellIOn,
nine gold teeth and long black curly hair, train journey and baby,
God's will and counting the digits, all associate thematically with
doing time in a prison camp and the contrasted pole of freedom and
gratifications, as T. S. Eliot associates garlic and sapphires in the
mud.
The Negro poet most obviously identified with this sort of the–
matic and associative organization is Melvin B. Tolson, in
his
re–
markable long poem
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.
Allen
Tate in a preface places the poem "in the direct succession" from
Hart Crane's
The Bridge,
and other critics have identified its tech–
niques with those of Eliot's
Waste Land
or Pound's
Cantos.
Reinforc–
ing rather than denying these analogies, I would insist on its kinship
to the associative organization of the blues. In any case, it is an
intricate and sophisticated work, and the advance in complexity it
represents can best be shown by comparing a stanza with one from
its obvious predecessor, Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Ode to Ethiopia."
Dunbar writes:
On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiope's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbor;
The forests flee before their stroke,
